Above the airlock, the quality of the ambient pressure changed. Coghlan’s ears popped, and she was suddenly aware of a…well, surging quality to the atmosphere. It was like being in a suit, where each beat of the induction pumps thudded against your ears and rebounded from the fabric of your neckseal.
Layers of fiberglass and steel sheathing concealed the actual juncture between Martian rock and the human-constructed domes. After a dozen steps, Demeter was conscious of translucent plastic over her head. The material billowed gently: not enough to flap, but just enough to say that internal air pressure was the only thing holding its shape—and that there was a steady wind on the other side. She was positive the designers would have included more than one layer of ripstop between her breathable air and the attenuated carbon dioxide whistling across the Martian surface, but Demeter was suddenly aware that those fast-acting lock doors had a real purpose.
Judging from the quality of light coming through the UV-yellowed plastic, the sun had gone considerably nearer the horizon than it had been when she came down the space fountain. She started looking around for a window to check this.
The first dome was about fifty meters across and twenty meters high at the center. The space was walled off with head-high partitions. A second and even third level extended into the upper reaches of the enclosed space with pipework scaffolding that looked none too steady. Demeter noted that the cubicles directly under the platforms were tented over for modesty. Otherwise, the living or working units—or whatever else they were—enjoyed the bland sky of the dome’s fabric.
Coghlan wandered around this collection of split-level huts, looking for the perimeter wall and a view of the planet’s actual surface at ground level. During her search, she glanced through the doorway of one cubicle, which was incompletely covered with a hanging cloth. Inside, she saw a modularized office: a half-desk, V/R terminal, string chair, disk rack, and what looked like an old-style drafter’s board—but with a couple of mice and an interactive surface. The sign outside the door said, CIVIL ENGINEERING, D2, WATER RESOURCES.
Clearly, whatever passed for government services in Tharsis Montes got second pick of the available office space. If there was ever a meteor strike against this bubble’s fabric that didn’t at once seal itself, it would be a bunch of low-level Civil Service bureaucrats who would be the first to go toes up. That thought did not surprise Demeter, who knew from experience that that was how governments usually worked.
This dome didn’t seem to have any outside windows. She strolled through the igloo tunnel into the next one, which seemed to be some kind of garage. A large fiberglass pressure lock was set into the far side of the wall area. Under the bubble were a collection of walkers, sized according to the number of pairs of legs they had, like insects. Demeter had read somewhere that articulated footpads were the preferred method of travel on light-gravity planets such as Mars. It wasn’t just because of the rough terrain, where practically every journey was offroad, since there were no roads. Wheels themselves were not Mars-friendly. They relied too much on traction to work. When the load to be hauled massed the same as on Earth, but actually weighed less than the coefficient of friction between the wheel and the underlying sand, then you could sit and spin for a long time without going anywhere. Left foot, right foot was the only sure way to get around.
The walkers inside the garage all had their hatches open and their access panels up. People and autonomous machines all had their heads under the panels, working on the innards. So, Demeter guessed, this wasn’t just a storage area but a repair shop of some kind.
Not until the third dome did Demeter Coghlan find a window on the world.
This turned out to be some kind of low-gravity gymnasium area, with vaults, bungees, trampolines, and a pool of blue water for swimming and diving. The height of the fabric overhead made most of these activities practical, where they wouldn’t have been in an underground tunnel. As soon as she walked through the strip door, Demeter felt her jumpsuit begin to wilt with dampness from the pool. Chlorine stung her nose. The room was almost deserted; she guessed everyone else was at work somewhere, looking forward to playtime.
Broad patches of the far wall had been left clear with a view to the east and south, and blowing dust hadn’t yet scratched the window’s outside surface too badly. Demeter walked up to the opening and looked for the nest of peaks guarding the Valles Marineris District—where she so longed to go. They were not visible over the curve of the horizon.
She turned and walked across the dome to the west side, to look at the sunset. On Earth, a heavier atmosphere buffered the sun at dawn and dusk, so that a person might stare directly at the swollen, reddened orb. Mars’s minimal blanket of air could not create that effect, but the plastic window had a fader circuit—something she hadn’t expected to find—and Demeter tuned it to the darkest setting. With that protection she could look directly at the silvery expanse of the photosphere, which was about half the diameter of the apparent disk as seen from Earth.
It was descending more slowly than the minute hand of an old-fashioned analog clock, right into the shoulder of the large crater she had seen during her descent, Pavonis Mons. The sun’s low-angle rays picked orange and red flashes out of the cone’s dark lava and cinders. In the foreground was the lower superstructure of the space fountain, already bathing the shadows with its own spectral violet light.
“Miz Coghlan?” a male voice said behind her. It was a high-pitched voice, even after accounting for the helium atmosphere.
“Yes?” She turned and saw a young man with bronzed skin stretched over a very handsome set of pectorals and a flat stomach ridged with smooth lines of muscle. His thighs were bunched and corded like Michelangelo’s David, with that cute inward cant to the left knee. Demeter guessed he had a nice, tight set of buns, too.
“I’m Jory den Ostreicher. They told me you needed a guide?” He was naked except for a pair of gray leather shorts and a utility belt or harness that buttoned to them like a pair of lederhosen. His feet, she saw, wore only a pair of light slippers, also of the same gray material. The boy, this Jory, was hairless, with a head as smooth as the bottom of a copper pot, except at the back. There some kind of dark, braided tassels hung down his neck and dangled between his shoulder blades, like a Chinese mandarin’s queue in an old-time woodcut. When he turned his head, she saw they were cables tipped with jumper plugs.
“Yes, they did…I mean, I do,” she replied falteringly.
He had some kind of beard, too, she thought at first, or at least a mustache and a little goatee. But a closer look showed this was not hair. There was some sort of dark pouching of his skin. The folds on either side of his mouth concealed Velcro tabs for hooking up a breathing mask.
His ears were long and cupped, like a German shepherd’s or a bat’s, and stood away from the side of his head. The focus of the lobes’ curves was not ear canals but small buttons of transparent skin, like miniature timpani. They were perfect for hearing in a fractional atmosphere yet could function under normal pressure as well.
“Unh…what are you?” she asked after an awkward pause.
“I’m a Creole.” He grinned. “Adapted for work on the surface.”
“Oh, a Cyborg, you mean.”
“Nah, they’re nothing but wires and pistons, with a computer where their brains used to be. But I’m fully human, except for some enhancements.”
“I see. So, you’d be my…proxy? I’d look through your eyes to—”
“No, I don’t prox for nobody. Underneath this skin I’m a person, just like you. But I’ll go along with you when you take out a unit. With my knowledge of the territory around here, you won’t get lost.”
“Do you know the Valles Marineris District?”
“Sure, been there a thousand times.”
“Can we go now?”
Jory’s face froze. His eyes took on a faraway look and his head tilted slowly to one side. The seizure, if that’s what it was, lasted for about ten seconds
. Demeter started toward the boy, afraid he would fall and hurt himself.
“Not today,” he said finally, his eyes coming back into focus. “All the proxies within walking distance of the Valles are currently booked. But I’ve reserved a pair for us tomorrow.”
“A pair?” Demeter said, stepping back into her usual conversational space. “Do you use virtual reality, then?”
“Hell yes, lady! I mean, I could walk there, but it’s a hell of…a long ways to go. Mars gets real cold at night, too, if you know what I mean.”
With that last comment he gave Demeter a look that—despite the nictitating membrane that involuntarily wiped across his eyeball in the moist, chemical-laden air—could only be described as a leer.
“I understand, Mr. den Ostreicher,” Demeter said coolly. And she hoped he would understand, too.
Mars Reference 0° 2’ S, 111° 7.5’ E, June 7, 2043
From the rattling and gurgling that assaulted her audio pickup, Sugar deduced that Demeter Coghlan had once again worn her comm bead in the shower. Yes, the focused roar of the hot-air jets, along with a marked rise in internal temperature, proved it. Oh well, Sugar was guaranteed waterproof.
From the readout of her inertial guidance system, Sugar estimated that they had returned to Demeter’s room at the Golden Lotus, and from there to the bathroom. Now, from the aural imaging of doors opening and closing, and from the clank! as the charm bracelet to which she was attached hit some flat surface—with, by the sound of it, one-point-two cubic meters of storage space underlying a layer of compressed fibers that might or might not be plaited polystyrene—Sugar knew her mistress was bedding down for the night. Time for Sugar herself to suspend function and recharge her batteries from the grid’s broadcast wave.
Then the chrono heard a distinctive rattle: the keys depressing on the room’s terminal board.
“Communications!” Demeter’s voice spoke softly.
“Yes, Dem?” Sugar replied instantly.
“Not you, Shoogs. I want the room’s terminal.”
“Never no mind, Dem.”
“Yes, Ms. Coghlan?” the terminal said—in what Sugar judged to be a slowed and octave-adjusted synthetic female voice trying to pass for nonaggressive male.
“Take a letter,” Coghlan directed. “Digitize and compress for Earth transmission with the next signal alignment…”
Sugar countermanded her own SUSPEND order. Any correspondence the boss initiated, she would probably want to call up and discuss later. Sugar decided to listen in and at least find out the file number for grid reference.
“Recording,” said that fakey voice.
“To Gregor Weiss, Survey Director, Texahoma Martian Development Corporation, Dallas—and look the rest up in your Earth directory—Dear Greg…”
Demeter’s voice paused for many nanoseconds.
“Umm, I’ve arrived on Mars, place called Tharsis Montes, where the elevator is, without incident—ah, Terminal?”
“Yes, miss?”
“You might put a few prepositions in there for me—whatever sounds good—and a few less commas. You don’t need to register every breath I take, hey?”
“Very good.”
“Text resumes. I’m passing the cover story you and Gee-dad worked up, about my needing a long vacation, and so far nobody’s interested. Nobody even knows I’m here, except maybe the computer system, and it doesn’t seem to care, either. They made me get a physical, looking out for contagious diseases, they say, and that’s about all.
“Paragraph. I’ve already established that the Zealanders are pushing ahead with the Valles Marineris area. Them or their agents here on Mars, that is. I didn’t get any maps, yet, but from the pix the grid was showing me, the site of their development seems to be right in the area we’re claiming. At least, the erosion layers look enough like the aerial survey analysis you made me memorize.
“Paragraph. The development, which they call quote Canyonlands unquote—Terminal, use punctuation marks there, will you, not the words themselves—claims to be for residential and food processing. And it looks as if they’re digging in, just like every other colony complex on this dustball. So, Greg, I would guess they haven’t figured out yet that the Marineris District is at a deep enough elevation for air pressure to build up faster than anywhere else on the surface. And open water, if and when, will collect there soonest, too. I don’t know if the Zealanders can be brought around to our terraforming scheme. And you might get me a care package of better intelligence a sap—no, Terminal, that’s one word, all caps…Jesus! you’re a dumb machine!—but, anyway, I guess they’d be almighty unhappy if they were to finish digging out a honeycomb of tunnels below bedrock just about the time we flood out the area with a lake or inland sea or something.
“Paragraph. Anyway, I’ve got a date tomorrow with one of the locals to go vee-are with a piece of the construction equipment or something. That’ll get me a sight of the area, and we can begin figuring how big an ouch the Zealanders will start registering when we file our project. I’ll have more when I get back.
“Paragraph. On other topics—yee-ee-hew!—no, that was a yawn, so don’t print it—I said, back up and erase that—no, not the whole—shit!
“Paragraph. On other topics, tell Gee-dad I’m in great shape and think I’m fully recovered from the accident. And no, there are no little third-generation Coghlans on the horizon. This is a working trip, not some kind of shipboard romance. Though, I tell you, Greg, if I were tempted to rattle the old fuddy’s chain, there’s this sexy little bunch I met today with the slickest skin, about medium chocolate, if you know what I—”
Thunk!
Sugar knew that sound, too. It was some kind of cap or cover coming down over the charm bracelet, blocking out all distinct sounds.
Demeter had this thing about even talking sex in front of computers, let alone doing it. But, of course, what did she think was taking her dictation right then? Anyway, Sugar’s eavesdropping was over for the evening. Time to get some juice.
SUSPEND…
Chapter 3
Teaching Your Grandfather to Suck Eggs
Golden Lotus, June 8
After a morning shower that was both metered and timed—allowing her only twenty-five seconds to shampoo and rinse her long tangle of hair—Demeter Coghlan went for breakfast in the hotel’s cafeteria-style dining room. The scrambled eggs (if that’s what they were), sausage, and vegetables were served chopstick-style, with enough sauce to bind them for first-timers in the low gravity. Demeter broke down and asked for a spoon, got something that resembled a high-sided rowboat with a long prow, and ended up popping down the biggest pieces with her fingers. Different cultures, different manners.
She still had about an hour before her date to go touring with that gorgeous guide, Jory Whatsisname. Demeter decided to use it improving her intelligence.
Normally Coghlan would prefer to go snooping with Sugar’s help, because the little comm unit could be amazingly discreet if she was told to be. But for this job Demeter wanted visuals, full-motion if available, and binaural audio as well as pure voice-only data. So, back in her room, she called up the terminal.
“Umm…” Demeter hesitated, trying to frame her questions casually. “I’d like some information on some other people who might be visiting Mars about now.”
“Casuals are listed in Directory Four,” the machine told her.
“Oh!” So Coghlan wouldn’t have to get personal with the grid after all. Her two fingers glided across the trackball, pulling down the correct directories and constructing her search pattern. What she wanted was a feeling for the opposition. The index showed a total of five North Zealanders and two United Koreans on-planet. Demeter called for dossiers—or whatever the local courtesy term was—with pix if possible.
The five Zealanders looked to be duds: two married pairs and a single, all with ages above fifty.
One of the pairs—the Bradens, William and Jane—had formally applied for colonial status.
The other two—Peter Wendall and his wife Genevieve—were shown as visiting the Bradens in their new farming community on the edge of Elysium.
Further analysis showed that these four people were actually related, Jane Braden being Peter’s sister. Demeter didn’t have a detailed picture of the North Zealand Economic Development Agency, known as “N-ZED” in the business, but she didn’t think their operating budget extended to paying passage on four people and colonial-placement fees on two more just to place one spy. Besides, Elysium was half a world away from Valles Marineris—not very convenient for keeping subtle tabs on the locals’ progress with their Canyonlands development, even with telepresent capability.
The terminal screen showed her in succession four alert faces, all with strong chins and heavy brows, all with white skins kept tanned and taut by clean living, hard work, and lots of exercise under expensive lamps. Pioneer types with first-rate educations, they would probably bring a whole arsenal of physics formulas to the job of fixing a water pump, but Demeter had no doubt they’d get it fixed.
The unmarried Zealander, Alfred Mann, was no relation to this family grouping, and his reason for visiting Mars was shown as “astronomical interests,” which was vague enough to be suspicious. But Demeter determined that he had touched down at Tharsis Montes just long enough to get a shuttle ride up to Phobos, where he’d spent the last six months at the observatory. So he could be eliminated as a factor.
The two Koreans caught her eye. They were traveling together, officially as master and servant—an odd listing for functionaries from one of Asia’s nominally most democratic nations. Although, actually, United Korea controlled just the enclave around Seoul, from Kaesong in the north to Inchon in the south, hardly a nation in itself. More like a city-state.
The dominant member of this pair was one Sun Il Suk, whose profession was simply “playboy.” That meant some kind of family money, withdrawn from one of the chaebols. The servant was a Chang Qwok-Do, whose employment status was shown as “retainer to the Sun family.”
Mars Plus Page 5
